Question

I’m building a scraper to pull stories from news sites. Here’s an example from the BBC news site:

require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/'))

doc.css('h2 a.story').each do |h2|

        puts "#{h2.content} - http://www.bbc.co.uk#{h2["href"]}"
end

What do I need to do to return a specific number of results, rather than all of them?

I had a look at the Nokogiri documentation and it isn’t very explanatory.

Answer 1

This is not a Nokogiri problem, it’s a Ruby array problem.

Use take for the first three results:

doc.css('h2 a.story').take(3).each do |h2|
  puts "#{h2.content} - http://www.bbc.co.uk#{h2["href"]}"
end

For the fourth to the eighth result use a Range:

doc.css('h2 a.story')[3..7].each do |h2|
  puts "#{h2.content} - http://www.bbc.co.uk#{h2["href"]}"
end